


into his hands

by blackeyedblonde



Category: True Detective
Genre: 1995 thru Post-Series, Anal Sex, Developing Relationship, Infidelity, M/M, Oral Sex, assholes being assholes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-16
Updated: 2014-11-16
Packaged: 2018-02-25 13:45:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2623919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They breathe hot in each other’s spaces, two planets crashed into a singular wrecked orbit, but Marty drops his hands and walks away, not yet wondering why he’ll always feel Rust weigh on him like a gravitational pull.</p>
            </blockquote>





	into his hands

**Author's Note:**

> This originally came into creation the night I read [once there was only dark](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2519051), so hella shout-out to fractionsofher for her lovely and inspiring work.

Marty’s old man had tended to impart life lessons in proverbs about a man in terms of his hands, passing his wisdom off in quiet beer can covenants, early mornings spent casting line at the fishing camp, encounters out behind the shed that ended in bright red blood on clenched teeth and a split below one eye that maybe looked a little like a veteran’s signet ring if you got a real good look at it.

You’d better be ready to win if you throw the first punch. You’d better be quick on the finger draw in more ways than one if you want to please a good woman. And hedging all bets, you’d still be hard-pressed to misjudge another man going off nothing more than the grip and swing of his handshake.

There’s a long stretch of years in Marty’s life after the old man’s dead and gone where he watches every single one burn and crumple to ash right there between the widening spread of his fingers.  
  


* * *  
  


The early autumn wind blows Rustin Cohle into CID like a walking pile of leaves—brittle and dry, bound to catch fire if you sparked the air just right, hair the same color as a dying southern oak when the sun reaches out to catch it. He stands like a real-time cowboy waiting on an excuse to brawl and when he takes Marty’s hand that first time in Quesada’s office, it comes in firm and solid and then slides away easy, one ring finger skimming light along the outer pad of Marty’s palm as he pulls away.

A fluke, Marty figures, just nerves and bad technique, and then it takes less than two weeks before the boys start pegging Cohle for queer.

“He’s a fucking faggot if I ever seen one,” Geraci says over lunch one afternoon, swirling lukewarm coffee around the bottom of a yellow mug. “You can smell a cocksucker coming from ten miles down and that right there…” he says, trailing off and tipping his head toward the break room Rust had disappeared into a scant couple of minutes prior.

Marty drops into his desk chair and leans back to wad a sandwich wrapper in his hands, swallowing around a mouthful of egg salad. “Way you talk, Steve,” he says—because his new partner might have the charisma of over-starched linen but Geraci is a fucking asshole—, “it almost sounds like you’re an expert on the matter.”

They all have a real good laugh about it. Cohle winds up giving them more reason to call him a highfalutin sonofabitch than a queer, and then the talk quiets down and tapers off until it falls into radio silence.

At odd hours in the car and the light fixture aisle at Home Depot and maybe once or twice in the shower, Marty catches himself thinking about that handshake.  
  


* * *  
  


Years and years later, Marty will know it had only ever been a matter of time, only ever a matter of snagging the wind just right. It would’ve come down to this eventually in the end, him and Rust, but damn if he’d ever expected the storm to strike mainland so early.

It breaks in the car on a Wednesday afternoon in the spring of ’95.

They’ve been driving. Coming off a dawn-lit crime scene sunk down in the bayou, part of a woman half-eaten by gators trawled up out of the muck. She was still fresh enough to be somebody’s bad time if they could figure what went down, and judging by the small hole at her temple that had her skull and brains blossoming open at the back, it hadn’t been any matter of pretty things.

Marty’s got a sound stomach on him but something about the decomps and the ones the animals get to before the elements do never quite sits right, never quite manages to be one of those things he can step far enough away from. Arterial spatters of ruby-dark blood, sticky grey matter thrown slapdash across walls and carpet and shower doors, people grinning from their necks rather than their mouths and all the usual fare—all that ain’t so bad, ain’t so bad until they start to stink, start to look like the chewed end of a fresh cow femur his old dog used to drag out into the yard and crack between her molars. The smell isn’t anything you could ever find in a textbook and it soaks through his clothes and into his skin, settles there for days until about six showers and too many splashes of cologne finally burns the reek and sight away enough to forget, but only until the next one comes around.

Now they’re twenty miles outside Baton Rouge with their jackets in the back seat and their sleeves pushed up, necks pricked to high hell with welted mosquito bites. Rust’s cigarettes are helping shake the smell of pond muck and the beginnings of pungent-sweet decay but the sight of the half-eaten body lingers, spilling out across the dash in chawed raw meat and pale entrails ripped free from a soft stomach.

Marty swallows and tightens his grip on the wheel, blinks a couple times and thinks a little vaguely about turning on the radio like that’d do any damn good, and only barely catches Rust closing his ledger and snuffing his cigarette in the ashtray from the corner of his eye.

“Pull over,” Rust says, tucking the black notebook between the center console and seat, and those are the first two words he’s said since they pulled back onto the highway forty-five minutes ago and he murmured _mind that semi, Marty._

“What for?” Marty asks, glancing quick to his right before looking straight ahead at the road. “You gotta take a piss?”

Rust shakes his head and breathes out tempered through his nose. “You grip that fucking wheel any tighter and it’s gonna snap off in your hands.”

Marty doesn’t take his foot off the gas. “Don’t see how me pulling over is fixing to solve anything,” he says. “I’m fucking fine, Rust. Don’t know what you’re on about.”

“Pull over, Marty,” Rust says again, and this time Marty sighs and swears but brakes until they’re crawling off cracked asphalt onto the scrubby shoulder. A glance in the rearview and one ahead proves empty, and he turns off the ignition, sitting there in the stagnant air with sweat already beginning to slide down his back.

This feels like a concession he wouldn’t normally make. “What the fuck am I pulling over for?”

Rust’s long-fingered hands spread and run down his thighs, smoothing the creases pulled in his pants. “Get out and come around here,” he says. “I’m fixin’ to suck you off.”

The still air somehow roars silent in his ears and Marty know he must’ve not heard him clear, must’ve not caught the right word, but then that means his mind made up _suck_ on the fly and what the fuck does that mean, what does that make him, the fucking queer between the two of them _because_ —

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he says, hating that there’s a rasp riding sharp on the undercurrent of his voice. Thinks he’s gonna say, _Looks like_ _we had your hand figured from the start_ , _sunshine_ , but what comes out instead is: “You never been one for any kinda subtlety, have you?”

“Ain’t got all afternoon,” Rust says, swinging his door open to let in a hot gust of Louisiana sunshine. “You coming around here or what?”

And it’s not Marty leaving the keys in the ignition and pushing the car door open, isn’t Marty walking around back of the car and through the grass to Rust’s side, not Marty letting himself get pushed down sideways into the passenger seat, sitting there struck half-dumb while Rust jimmies his belt and zipper open and palms him quick through his briefs.

“Look at that,” Rust says like he’s commenting on the weather, not wasting any time in getting Marty’s dick pulled free and out into the open. “All ready to go.”

Marty tries to find a comeback, tries to rebuke and shoot the truth out of the air, but before the words can even scrape past his teeth Rust is kneeling down between his legs and taking him into his mouth, swallowing and sucking him down in one fell swoop.

The world goes a little soft around the edges after that, and all Marty knows is heat—dripping down his back, burning like fire in his gut, wrapped wet and tight around his cock while Rust takes it like a fucking champ, pushing down eager, already slobbering and making little urging noises in the back of his throat that Marty feels shoot up his spine like live currents until they ring high noon behind his eyes.

Rust fists his hands around Marty’s thighs to keep himself anchored, pulls off quick to lick one long stripe from base to tip before he comes back in and holds on for the ride, gagging and breathing ragged through his nose while Marty gets his hands tangled in his hair and fucks deep into his throat until the air seizes and ignites and he’s burning up with it, coming hard enough to see stars with Rust’s mouth still on him, swollen and wet and swallowing down every last fucking drop.

Rust slides off with a lewd sound and doesn’t spit in the grass, just runs the back of his hand across his mouth and stands to lean against the side of the car with his breath coming a little faster than normal, arm braced against the doorframe with his pensive cowboy look thrown back up into place. The first car they’ve seen in ten minutes rolls past, and he only stands there and watches it go.

“Goddamn,” Marty pants, sun and sex-blinded, tucking his dick away and not even bothering to zip up just yet. “Just sucked my fucking brains out.” He blinks through the brightness and feels a little like a staked tent canopy cut loose and left to float in the breeze, but the fabric still tenting obscene around Rust’s crotch doesn’t end up going unnoticed.

“Guess that did me right,” Marty says, threading his belt back up with fumbling fingers. “But just so you know, I ain’t any kind of fuckin’ queer.”

Rust squints off into the afternoon and doesn’t look down when he answers. “Don’t reckon I am, either. Least not full time.”

“Alright then,” Marty says, and sits for a long moment before he reaches out and runs two fingers light but unmistakable up the inseam of Rust’s thigh until he’s got his palm pressed flat against the hard heat between his legs.

“Now that we’ve got that settled,” he says, not thinking too hard about what they’re doing when Rust groans low and pushes into his hand, how all this is shooting through him like some sick kind of thrill, “what d’you want me to do about this?”  
  


* * *  
  


Rust takes his hands in the locker room and threatens to snap his wrists clean, does it this time like a man—no skimming ring finger, none of the teasing, petting kind of touches they may or may not have exchanged since that day they walked out the bayou and straight into something else.

They breathe hot in each other’s spaces, two planets crashed into a singular wrecked orbit, but Marty drops his hands and walks away, not yet wondering why he’ll always feel Rust weigh on him like a gravitational pull.

He’s got some pussy on him, true enough, and somehow that’s another one of his father’s old wisdoms burst into irreparable flame.  
  


* * *  
  


They carry two children back in from the Louisiana jungle, two different casualties of a battle barely fought and a war that won’t ever be won, and at first Marty doesn’t know why Rust steps in front of the boy and gently shoves him toward the girl, just nods his head and gathers her against him like a pile of dirty rags, but in that moment he’s alive enough to be thankful.

After a couple showers and a rapid comedown spent over coffee and shared cigarettes, briefing and debriefing, two calls made to Maggie with varying results, a day wasted up at the station in hard-backed chairs and the promise of sitting in front of the board committee sometime in the dawning week, they’re left to their own devices, dropped out of the feedback loop and sent home together in sedated quiet like the morning had never happened at all.

“Fuck,” Marty sighs that night from the passenger seat of his own car, breaking into the untouched silence and jamming the heels of his hands into his eyes hard enough to see spots of color. Rust sits smoking behind the wheel, and when Marty pulls his hands away he watches stars and bars of gold flash over his arms as they pass under streetlights.

“Jesus,” he says this time, with a little more exhausted feeling, like maybe he’d have better chances of pulling Rust loose with that one. “What I’d give just to be able to go home right now. Just go on home.”

They’re two blocks from Rust’s place and his eyes don’t swerve from the road. “Whoever you’re asking ain’t gonna help with that,” he says three cues too late on exhale. “Unless god just so happens to moonlight as a woman and two little girls.”

Marty squares his jaw and breathes deep through his nose but finds his eyes falling shut in lieu of his hands balling into fists. “You know,” he says, “you say this kind of shit to me and it’s a goddamn wonder I don’t knock your fucking teeth down your throat.”

“We’d wreck, considering I’m driving,” Rust says, unbothered. “And then you’d have one more thing to try and explain out your ass in the morning.”

He sucks down another drag and steers not with his hands but with a single wrist wrung over the wheel. “Couple that with the fact you know it’s true, else you wouldn’t feel the need to rise to the occasion and mouth off about things you ain’t gonna follow through on.”

“You telling me I wouldn’t?”

Rust pulls up in front of his apartment and looks over at Marty, then, like he’s seeing him for the first time since they pulled out of the station parking lot.

“Yeah,” he says soft, blinking easy in the dark. He shifts up into park and pulls the keys out of the ignition, tossing them underhand into Marty’s lap. There’s an endless kind of moment where they sit watching one another while the engine settles and then Rust is opening his door and stepping out, dropping something low that sounds like _C’mon_ in his wake.

Marty finds himself standing in the bare-bones living room, looking at the same pile of books and boxes and fraternal twin lawn chairs, the crucifix and nickel-sized mirror and Spartan mattress he’s been keeping quarters with for the past fortnight—mostly without Rust, who’d fucked off doing God knows what God knows where using a five-letter alias. It’s all familiar and no longer novel in its peculiar frankness, just the same as it’d looked before.

Rust is here, too, now. A makeshift and temporary kind of furnishing in his own fucking house, but not the same, not the same as before, and something about it burns and crackles faint in the air between them, a lazy kind of molasses-thick heat lightning.

“I should get my stuff,” Marty says in a voice that he isn’t entirely sure belongs to him, watching Rust sit to kick his boots off. “Clear out. Get a room somewhere.”

“Alright,” Rust says, not looking up from where he’s loosening his laces. He finishes and stands on bare feet, the first time Marty can ever remember seeing them, and shrugs off the cuffed flannel he’d worn back in to the station until he’s stripped back down to just his wifebeater and slacks.

“You can let yourself out,” he says on his way down the hall, and after he disappears into the bathroom and leaves a sliver of light shining through the cracked door Marty resolves to gather his belongings—his shit, his wits, his fucking senses—and burst back out into the open night, walk right out and not come back.

There’s still three fingers of Jameson sitting on the counter and he draws off a mouthful straight from the bottle, feels it scorch like a cleansing fire the whole way down. He stands for a moment on the carpet and stares glassy-eyed at Rust’s dead girl wallpaper still taped up over the barren white, and before he can do something like rip it all down and put his foot through the drywall he turns and steals away down the hallway and up the stairs, back to the master bedroom he’s been crashing in on a goddamn blowup mattress.

He figures fuck the deflated bed, he won’t be needing it anymore, and shoves his clothes and shoes haphazard into the black duffel he brought in and threw down the week before. Slings the bag over one shoulder and strikes back out for the front door, swinging around the staircase bannister and running smack into Rust just as he’s stepping out of the bathroom.

They crash in a collision of hips and shoulders and hands, and Marty knows like he knows how to breathe that Rust would never step headlong into an accident like this, probably fucking heard him swallow that finger of booze from the kitchen, followed the soft thud of his boots through the ceiling and down the carpeted hall—

“Huh,” Rust says, like it’s neither here nor there, a steadying hand braced light on Marty’s shoulder. “Thought you were heading out.”

“I am,” Marty says, more of a grating rasp than two words, and when he moves Rust moves with him, fingers sliding down his arm to catch gentle around his elbow.

They stand pressed together there in the hall, and some part of Marty thinks for a split-second about winding up and clocking Rust one, about breaking his nose and flying out the front door, and then he stops short and remembers last night in vivid dreaming technicolor.

Remembers Rust’s eyes gone wild, remembers watching that bullet-eaten leather jacket disappear around a bend in the bayou, remembers the way his heart felt like it was going to pound slam out of his chest when the satellite phone rang on the passenger seat, _only one person calling, motherfucker, one, only one._

“What the fuck is this?” Marty says here and now, words furiously whispered in the open space between Rust’s neck and shoulder where he can feel heat roll off the other man in waves. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Rust’s eyes are hidden under the weight of his lashes but Marty can feel them lying heavy along the line of his jaw. “I wouldn’t question it, Marty,” he tells him. “You ain’t much good at handling your own truths.”

“You motherfucker,” Marty hisses, and then the duffel’s on the floor and he’s slamming Rust back into the wall hard enough that his head cracks against it, shoving into his mouth with a bruising clatter of lips and teeth and tongue.

Rust opens wide and takes it, welcomes it, moans downright pretty into Marty’s mouth as he reaches around to get a handful of his ass and feels the other man buck hard against him, swearing dirty as he sucks kisses along the line of his throat.

They blow like a hurricane down the hallway and fall together onto that bare mattress peaked by a secondhand crucifix, hanging halfway off it as they push and pull clothes away until all that’s left are Marty’s boxers and then Rust is straddling him with a fistful of those, too, yanking them down over Marty’s hips until they’re bunched up around his thighs.

“You got anything I need to worry about?” Marty asks, flat on his back, and he doesn’t know where the hell the lube came from but Rust has already got it, slicking up his fingers and oh Jesus fuck, reaching back between his legs to sit on his own hand.

“I should be asking you the same shit,” Rust hisses as something shudders up through him while he works, come and gone like a heat mirage, and then both hands are back in view and that was no time at all, not anywhere near enough, but he’s already giving Marty one wet stroke and rising up on his knees with his dick straining half-hard between his legs. Rises up and comes back down again, just like that, and sinks down so tight and easy that Marty has to bite his lip to keep from saying Rust’s name lest it come out full-blown sacrilege.

He gets his hands around Rust’s hips and feels them snap and roll in his grasp, listens to the man make a noise like he’s dying when he pushes down to sit flush against Marty with his breath coming ragged, hands sliding down his own thighs as he starts in on a slow ride.

“Oh God, Rust—oh _fuck_ , look at you,” Marty says, and this time he doesn’t care what he sounds like, can’t be bothered because his whole body feels fire-lit, sparking clear down to the soles of his feet while Rust sits there above him with his head tipped back, living room light eclipsing behind his head like a hardware store halo.

It builds fast and heavy and Rust has almost bitten his own mouth raw, gasping and moaning, “M-Marty, Marty, _Marty_ ” like it’s the only fucking thing he can remember to say, only name he knows, and Rust might have a penchant for ten-dollar words but this one sounds like it was cast in gold and cracked out of a broken mold.

Marty fucks up into him and yanks down hard enough to rattle his teeth in his head, thinks this might be deeper than he’s ever been in any woman, and one last roll of Rust’s hips has him going and gone, tipping over into the big whiteout with the other man’s name turned into the real thing, red-orange corrosion caught deep in his throat.

It doesn’t take Rust long to follow and for all his whorish moaning he comes dead-silent with nothing but air stuttering in his chest, bowed down over Marty with his hands braced against his shoulders, all shaking thighs and mouth dropped open wide as he rides out the last of it in an easy-rocking rhythm.

Rust sits back up when it’s over, breathing heavy but not yet rolling off, and Marty reaches out to palm his heaving side, fitting the tips of his first three fingers into the bullet-carved grooves there. He’s stark naked and still balls-deep in Rust but this is the more intimate act somehow, more undeniable, the kind of thing that draws a line somewhere he can’t be bothered to think about just yet.

But Rust only reaches up to find Marty’s hand, draws it up and holds it flat against his chest so Marty can feel the frantic, velvet-winged beat of his heart fluttering through his fingertips. Then he leans forward and presses two fingers to the pulse thrumming below Marty’s ear, holds two more to his own and counts off beats in measured time.

“Been a long time,” he rasps a little hoarsely, and Marty doesn’t know if it’s his place to ask what or why, but he knows all the same.

Then Rust swings up and off like a goddamn cowboy, just as rubber-legged and saddle sore, and Marty thinks he’s going to make a break—stand up and disappear into the barren expanse of apartment like a prophet in the desert—, but the man only flops down onto the narrow mattress next to him and blinks up at the ceiling like he’s come up slowly out of a dreaming daze.

“The boy,” Rust says after a moment. “The one we found at Ledoux’s.”

“Don’t you fucking start that shit,” Marty groans, reaching up to press into his eyes. “I don’t want to hear anything about dead children, Rust, not here, not right now—”

“It ain’t like that,” Rust says, and won’t look at him, though it isn’t lost on Marty that they’re touching again, that he’s closed the space between them so their arms and thighs are pressed close. “I wouldn’t let you take the little boy.”

“Yeah,” Marty says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. “Pushed me toward the girl.”

“What we do,” Rust starts, pausing to pull in a quiet breath. “It’s our job to open our eyes against the brutality of what mankind does to one another in the dark. Our fuckin’ purpose, to see the kind of shit that shouldn’t be seen. We accept that for what it is, and we abide it—or at least I know I have.”

“I don’t know whether to take it as a compliment or injury,” Marty says, “that finally gettin’ some has made you sound crazier than the usual.”

“I wanted to spare you, Marty,” Rust says, like he hadn’t even heard him. “When I haven’t wanted to spare anybody else in a long time.”

Marty blinks, suddenly hyperaware of how close Rust is, how naked they are, whose cum is cooling on his stomach, how Rust’s fingers are tracing idle shapes on the inside of his right wrist in a pattern he probably doesn’t even know. “From what?” he asks.

“I couldn’t keep you from seeing,” Rust tells him. “But maybe I could save you the burden of carrying fragile death.”

“Rust,” Marty says, but then Rust is sitting up, wiping them both down with his undershirt and walking naked across the room to palm his cigarettes off the kitchen counter.

He lights one up and sucks about a third of it down in one long pull, then comes back to the mattress with an empty whiskey glass in hand, folds himself onto bed to lean back against the wall.

“You still heading out?” he asks, letting a curl of smoke wind up slowly from between parted lips.

“That a rhetorical question?” Marty asks, and then, taking the cigarette from Rust’s hand to breathe through the spell of nicotine, “Guess tomorrow, I will. Need to start working on fixing things with Maggie.”

“All right,” Rust says.

And he stays.  
  


* * *  
  
Things are different, after Ledoux.

A pane of tinted glass between them gone and given way, and now whenever Marty reaches out Rust is something more substantial than a warm curl of cigarette smoke, wrapping around his fingers instead of slipping through them.

Somewhere not too long after the shootout he spends a long night at a strip joint and doesn’t ever make it back to the motel room he’s been crashing at since clearing out of Rust’s to give them both some headspace. He ain’t calling it home, though, because Maggie hasn’t come around just yet but she will, he knows—she’s gonna. He just tracks back up to CID a little after six in the morning and goes to shower off the sweet stink of working women and middle-class booze in the locker room, only half surprised to find that Rust is already there.

Naked as a jaybird, standing under the hot spray of the shower, one sleepy-eyed glance thrown his way to check who’s coming and then after that the fucker turns round so all Marty can see is the long line of his back ending in a supple curve of ass. Six foot of pale gold skin slippery-wet with soap and goddamn if that ain’t an invitation if he’s ever fucking seen one, and when he all but rips his clothes off and steps into the shower in record time Rust only blinks through the steam and drawls, “I could smell you coming from a mile away.”

It’s quick and dirty and as thrilling as Marty’s ever had it, strung out on a heady mix of white-hot desire and ugly terror burning low in the pit of his stomach while he gets Rust up against the shower wall and fucks him right there in the locker room for anybody to walk in and see.

Rust’s hands are splayed out on the blue and white tile, braced there while he pushes his ass out and moans muffled around bitten lips like a two-bit whore, taking it raw from behind with Marty’s fingers digging bruises into his hips. Water runs like rain down his back and Marty thinks about drinking from Rust like a well until he’s run dry, settles instead for mouthing against the back of his neck as he reaches around and pushes them both across the finish line, tumbling in one after the other with a strangled shout and a mess that has to be rinsed off the shower wall.

Not two minutes after Marty finishes kissing Rust’s lips swollen while soap slides slick between them and finally towels off, Lutz walks in with the morning paper, gives him a bleary-eyed nod and disappears into one of the bathroom stalls without ever having taken a moment to think about both of them still being shower-damp and half naked and only one of the two stalls christened with the shine of water.

Later in the day, when Campbell makes some offhand crack about Marty looking a little better now that he’s finally getting some, Marty kindly directs him to fuck off and is real careful about not looking across his desk, tells himself if he does that’ll be the end of it right then and there, both of them spun out clean in the wash.

And when he does finally look up, Rust isn’t meeting his eye—only staring down at a stack of paperwork with a cigarette burning in one hand and a pen scratching in the other, mouth quirked up into a bare brush of what Marty knows is an honest-to-God fucking smile.  
  


* * *  
  


It keeps on and doesn’t stop, and Marty figures if it’s Rust he smells like when he drags ass back home, Maggie will never be any wiser.

Rust in his mouth when she kisses him in the kitchen on weeknights, Rust spilled hot on his hands and wiped off with fast food napkins leftover from lunch, Rust cussing a muffled blue streak against his palm when he bends him over on the side of the road and fucks him against the car while traffic hums past just out of sight.

Whatever this is, Marty decides, this thing caught between the two of them—it isn’t bound to last. Isn’t bound to leave a lipstick stain on his collar, and it sure as hell won’t leave pussy burning hot on his fingers if anybody ever decides they’ve got cause enough to ask.

Is there another woman? Maggie would say, hands braced up on her hips with her eyes slapped against him, broiling and caustic like some kind of blue-tinted corrosive.

No, he’d tell her. There ain’t.

And that’d be God’s honest truth.  
  


* * *  
  


When Laurie comes around and sticks, Marty’s grateful.

She’s good for Rust, he reckons, in the ways a woman can be good for a man. Shows up to the Fourth of July barbecue with a seven-layer dip and a jean-clad Texan in tow who actually lights off a couple bottle rockets, smiling around the cigarette clamped between his teeth. She somehow convinces him to finally buy a kitchen table and invest in a bedframe to get that goddamn mattress up off the floor, and then gives the man a tie with the barest hint of pinstripe in it like she’d done it just to see if she could, and damn near gotten away with it until Rust looked down in the car one midmorning on a Tuesday and said, “The fuck is this?”

He and Rust have calmed it down in the lull of the quiet years—working honest and catching more often than not, running steady on an easy kind of rapport, and if there’s a couple roadside stops somewhere in there every now and again where Rust reaches across to undo Marty’s belt and leans over the console, Marty doesn’t think twice about what it means to return the favor.

In the late summer of that sixth year, there’s an evening where Marty swings by Rust’s place, originally come by to pick up a loaned floor fan, but then they both end up spread out on the living room carpet nursing a couple beers, watching the dying sun slant in through the blinds until Marty sets his bottle aside and closes the space between them.

Rust’s mouth opens easy under his and they make out like a couple of punch-drunk teenagers for a spell, all searching hands and lazy tongues until Marty reaches for Rust’s belt buckle and feels a familiar hand brace solid around his forearm.

“What?” he half-pants, blinking at Rust in the deepening twilight. “You expecting company?”

Rust doesn’t say anything, but he drops his hand and closes his eyes against the ceiling. Marty leans back in to nip along the edge of his jaw, dragging his mouth down into the dip of Rust’s throat until the other man gasps soft beneath him, like he’d been trying to quell it, and curls his fingers into the back of Marty’s shirt.

“Don’t tell me she gives it better than I do,” he says, and turns Rust over and fucks him from behind right there on the living room floor.

Afterward, when they’re lying next to one another in the dark, Rust will clear his throat before his old zippo sparks into life, bathing his face in a short-lived glow until the lid clicks shut.

“We’d might better quit all this,” he says, without any kind of prelude. “Think it’s run its course.”

Marty reaches over and drags his fingers through Rust’s short-cropped hair, misses the longer waves there but won’t own up to it for a real long time yet. “Might have a little rug burn, but I didn’t think it was that bad,” he half-laughs, swiping his thumb soft over Rust’s cheekbone on the way back down.

That’s the last time he touches Rust’s face without splitting his knuckles for more than ten years.  
  


* * *  
  


Marty throws the first punch with the aim to win and winds up getting his ass beat, knows by the end of it all that Rust could have killed him one-handed if the boys hadn’t pulled them apart before it went any further downhill.

There will be a few times in the following decade where he catches himself almost wishing he had.

“I fucked your partner,” Maggie tells him later. “I fucked Rust.”

Marty signs the divorce papers when they get pushed his way and doesn’t say he’d been doing just the same for nigh on seven years.  
  


* * *  
  


Sitting on the floor of the throne room with Rust’s head cradled in his lap, Marty watches the first flare go up like a humming pinch of diamond light and wonders if this is the kind of star worth wishing on.

The hot pulse of crimson is beginning to slow under his fingers and he thinks how it’s more suiting, maybe, after all this time, his hands keeping Rust held together instead of trying to tear him apart.  
  


* * *  
  


They walk arm-in-arm out of the hospital parking lot and straight into one fuckup of a proverbial sunset, and things come back together slowly before they come together all at once. There’s a soft-edged comfort in familiarity, and Marty tells himself it’s all circumstance and proximity but has a niggling suspicion—that he’ll never share with Rust, not until nearly two years later on a winter morning—that it must have been fate that pulled the loose thread between them, drawing two ripped edges back into one imperfect seam.

Threadbare and lopsided, maybe—but it holds.

Rust smokes inside and swallows his pills dry no matter how many glasses of water Marty brings him, tries to wash his hair on his own and pops a fucking stitch loose bright and early on a Sunday morning. He tells Marty his curtains look like they came out of a Cracker Barrel in Kansas, only takes his scrambled eggs drowned to death in Crystal and turns out to be a blanket hog even though Marty would have bet the farm and his left nut on the contrary. He doesn’t ask to borrow Marty’s electric razor when he shaves the mustache off two weeks into their new gig, only walks back out into the living room with it gone and sits there slumped on the couch in sweats and a borrowed t-shirt while he alternates between watching Jerry Springer and some mind-numbing nature special, keeping the volume cranked up to high heaven so when Marty finally walks out of the office and notices he has to shout _thank Christ, it’s about goddamn time._

He does all this, but he does it with one hand ghosting soft over Marty’s elbow, with a guffawing, rasping kind of laugh that Marty can’t remember counting five times in another life, while he’s sitting on the couch pressed flush and warm up against Marty’s side, not saying shit when familiar fingers come up to part through the greying waves at the base of his neck—maybe leans into it a little, too, but that’s something both of them know better than to comment on.

They slip into the same bed at the end of every night and don’t make it into any kind of big thing because it ain’t, not anymore, and sometimes but not always they’ll wake up before the sun to lay together in the weak half-light, not doing anything more than relearning the taste and terrain of one another, tracing over scars new and old like worn paths on an atlas map.

And it ain’t perfect, Marty thinks, but it’s good. The kind of good he hadn’t known he’d been missing, and if and when Rust happens to go off into a lesser ghost of one of his old rants, Marty sits back and actually goddamn _listens_.

A couple nights after the stitches come out, he’s stretched out on one side of the bed with Rust laying silent on the other, an endless cavern of empty space spanning between them, and the man breathes so quiet Marty would almost have to turn on the light to figure out if he was sleeping or awake. Almost but not quite, because these days he can read every hitch and sigh in Rust’s breath like a blind man touching words in the dark.

So when Rust makes one little noise—just the slightest whisper of conscious air—, Marty knows he’s awake even before he turns over on his side with the bed and sheets shifting easy along with him.

“Marty,” Rust says, one word drawn heavy with nearly twenty years sagging behind it, and that’s it, that’s the only sign Marty needed, and when he turns to reach for the other man Rust is already meeting him halfway, fitting their mouths together with one hand resting light around Marty’s neck, thumb tracing soft and mindless along the line of his jaw.

“Yeah, Rust,” Marty answers against his lips, like a promise, like a prayer, and when he gets his hands around Rust’s waist and pulls him close enough to feel the hot ridge of his scar he thinks this is maybe one proverb his old man wasn’t good or holy enough to impart.

What few clothes they fell into bed with get pulled up and pushed away to land at the foot of the mattress and the floor, and before they can move any further Marty reaches across Rust and fumbles for the lamp through the blackness, washing the room in warm hues of weak marigold light.

“What’d you do that for?” Rust asks in a low voice pitched velvet-soft, hands not once relinquishing their hold on Marty.

“Wanna see you,” Marty says without any falter, without any ounce of the old shame as he kisses up Rust’s chest, mouthing the words against his throat. “Can’t watch you in the pitch dark.”

“Funny you say that,” Rust tells him, twining his legs up with Marty's and pulling him closer. “I never had any trouble finding you there.”

There isn’t anything left to say because they’ve already said it all, and when Rust is gasping and writhing beneath his hands Marty presses him down into the mattress and rocks into him deep and easy, kissing against all the little sounds Rust makes that he’s maybe never heard before, eyes coming back to find his face again and again until they both slowly unravel together and come apart.

And after there’s no hot-blooded panic to untangle and depart, no need to spit and rinse, none of the old half-assed denial and eyes cast down and aside like maybe it wouldn’t ever happen again until it always, inevitably, eventually did. Nothing but the two of them pressed together like two parts of a whole and one uncertain fucking expanse of a future, as Rust might be wont to call it, but it’s not so hard to weather when you’re two strong instead of just one.

He’s made some mistakes, by his father’s and his own right, but Marty doesn’t have to worry about his own hands too much these days. Rust’s are here now, and when they open he goes into them willingly.  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> As somebody who has gotten pretty comfortable writing comfortably domestic middle-aged rednecks, this turned out to be a trial and a half. '95 Rust has always been and continues to be an enigma for me, so pitching the dynamic here in a way that wasn't straight out of left field proved to be a little difficult at times. With that being said, I sure hope it worked out.
> 
> Other than that, boy am I glad to have gotten this out of my system. It was fun while it lasted, but I'll be taking the next train straight back to 2012. See y'all in the upcoming Christmas chapters of "What We've Got"!


End file.
